Instead of writing an IRC bot, I have written an IRC client in Rust here: https://github.com/FreeFull/ircclient . Beware, I haven't put much effort into making the code clean or well documented. Writing an IRC bot would be easier than a client, because you wouldn't have to deal with reading from stdin, and you'd be able to keep everything single-threaded. The IRC library I use doesn't have any tokio support yet.